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Guided Meditation: Peace

Hello everyone. We come to the end of this week, the end of this five-part series I'm calling "Finding Our Way." These days have been somewhat progressive, pointing first to contentment, then to gladness, then to joy, then to happiness, and today the topic will be peace. Peace and agitation—finding our way with that.

This week, the idea in my mind, heart, and body is that with practice, we begin settling into ourselves. We settle into these states inside which are available to us but are often eclipsed by agitation, preoccupations, and the busyness of life. To become quiet, to be able to let go and relax enough to touch into our capacity for contentment, gladness, joy, happiness, and now, peace.

Today the topic is peace. I think it is really important to understand how peace can begin with ourselves. In Buddhist practice, that is where we tend to start. If we want peace, we start with ourselves. We start by being peaceful. That seems a little hard to start with—to want what we don't have, and then start with it. There are two things around this.

One is to bring into the meditation whatever sense of peace or peacefulness that is available to you. One of the important areas of that is in the knowing, in the attention you bring to whatever is happening here and now. If you're bringing attention to your breathing, your posture, or your body, or if you're bringing attention to your emotions, your inner mental life, or your thoughts—can you bring that attention, evoke that attention, or engage that attention in a way that has some kind of peacefulness to it? It doesn't have to be dramatic, but that is where it begins.

The second thing, which is different than the first but the two can go together, is rather than being too active and making yourself peaceful, avoid agitating yourself. Avoid agitation. Rather than become peaceful, don't participate in the agitation. Don't go along with it. One way not to go along with it is to be aware of it peacefully: "There it is, my agitation, my old friend."

Peace begins with oneself. So, assume a meditation posture and give some care to the posture in a peaceful way. The attention to the posture, getting things lined up and settled, is done not in a hurry and not ambitiously, but peacefully.

Then gently close your eyes, taking a few long, slow, deep breaths.

Let your breathing return to normal. In an unhurried way, go through your body, and as you exhale, relax and soften your body.

If it's appropriate, you can center yourself on your breathing.

As you exhale, quiet the mind. Maybe you can't stop thinking, but can you quiet your thinking?

In the times in your life where you felt peaceful, where in your body did that sense of peacefulness reside? Might there be a place in your body that you associate with peacefulness? A place that feels quiet or calm? That feels settled or content? That feels unagitated, calm, tranquil?

Maybe breathe with this place. Maybe the memory or the sense of this place being peaceful can help your awareness, your attention, to be peaceful too.

Whatever degree of peacefulness you have right now, no matter how small a little peace there is, notice the peacefulness.

And then see if you can avoid becoming more agitated. If that's all you do, that will be a great meditation.

As we come to the end of the sitting, consider how healthy and helpful it is for this world for there to be more peace. The people we run into in our lives today, chances are they could use a little bit more peacefulness. Maybe they are agitated, afraid, angry, or confused.

Consider how whatever peace you have, whatever way you live your life, you can in some gentle way bring peacefulness to this world, a sense of peace. It's probably best that it's not too noticeable, just that you're calm, centered, or available in a nice way.

May it be that this practice that we do serves for the welfare and happiness of others and for this world. May all beings be happy. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be safe. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Finding our Way (5 of 5) with Peace and Agitation

Buddhism is often associated with peace. In fact, the emotional manifestations of awakening and freedom that the Buddha points to are most commonly associated with happiness and peace. The opposite of peace is maybe agitation or conflict, and that is part of our world. We navigate a world where we get agitated. We are calm, and then we are not so calm. We are maybe somewhat peaceful, but then we are not peaceful, we are agitated, and then we are less agitated.

How do we find our way in this world of navigating all this? When do we emphasize peace, appreciate it, value it, and cultivate it? When do we allow ourselves to become agitated or less peaceful, or allow ourselves to be energized in a dynamic way that doesn't feel very peaceful?

There are times for both. As we're living in this world, there are times when it's appropriate to put aside our peace and let ourselves enter into the world of doing and activity, not being so concerned about whether we're agitated or if we've lost our calm. So, there are times for peace and times where peace is not really the name of the game or really appropriate. There are also times when agitation is inappropriate and a challenge, making our life much more difficult. And there is a time to allow ourselves to become agitated or lose some of our calm.

It's easy to argue that it's maybe always good to be calm, but realistically I don't know if that's really going to happen unless we're living a solitary, quiet lifestyle. If your neighbor comes knocking at your door with a big injury and asks you to take them to the emergency room, that's not the time to be excessively concerned about your calm. As you get to the emergency room, maybe your neighbor can't talk much, so you have to explain and be engaged in the activity, and chances are you're not going to keep your calm. You're going to be activated in some strong way. Enough so that when your friend is finally being taken care of and you can sit quietly, you see how much activation there is—you're spun up. But it's not wrong to have that happen in those circumstances. To hold onto calm and peace, saying, "Let's make our way to the car slowly and peacefully, count our steps, and with every step say peace," that's not really the name of the game. We have to let go of any emphasis on peace and just engage in what's needed. Being in the world with what's needed is part of what Dharma practice is about.

Certainly, it's possible to be attached to peace and hold onto it. It's possible to pretend we're peaceful, containing ourselves in certain ways so we're not agitated physically or moving around a lot, staying close to something that looks like peace. But it's more attachment, manufactured, and not really real.

The ability to navigate between activated states and peaceful states is much easier if we are fluid. If we resist one or hold onto one, then we're not fluid, and it's not easy to go back and forth between them. One of the principles of Dharma practice that I value a lot is not that we attain any particular state as if that's the state we're supposed to be in. There are all kinds of mental and embodied states that we can experience. To be free is to have fluidity, to be able to move between them back and forth. If we have that fluidity, we can navigate this world of all these differences much quicker and more easily.

If we don't have that fluidity, we become fragile. We're holding on, we're resisting, and we are threatenable because what we're holding onto is threatened, or what we're afraid is going to happen will come and overwhelm us. But if we can surf with it, navigate with fluidity, ease, and relaxation—not holding onto anything and not resisting much, at least in the inner life—it's much easier to let go. It's much easier to not be troubled by things.

There are activated states in life, and there are peaceful, calm states. Sometimes it's healthy just to move between them with fluidity. It's okay to be activated and lose our calm sometimes. Sometimes it's not; sometimes we lose our calm and make mistakes, making the whole thing worse. Agitation can create a lot of stress and exhaustion. Navigating this is much harder if we are clinging, grasping, holding on, and resisting—all of which create more agitation and less peace. Non-clinging and non-attachment create more fluidity, less attachment, more appropriate peace, and a greater capacity to flow out of that peace when something else is needed, and when it's no longer needed, flowing back to a calm state or being centered.

Finding our way with peace and activation, peace and agitation, has to do with becoming connoisseurs of both. Don't just become experts on peace, but become experts on agitation itself. Mindfulness is really to see and understand how our life works, what these things we go through are really like. Spend time when you're agitated with the question: What is this agitation? How am I experiencing it? What's being triggered? Where does it live in me? What's my relationship to this agitation? Do I believe it? Do I go headlong into it? Am I resisting it? Am I judging it? Am I critical of myself for being agitated?

There are all these things to study and become much more aware of. We can bring a peaceful mindfulness to that, a non-conflictive mindfulness: "This is how it is. This is how it is." Equally well, we want to study peace. We want to get to understand it, become connoisseurs, and recognize it. Even the small hints of it, even when it's a very minor peace, be able to recognize when it's available. Peace is much more available than most people realize. Most situations we're in have more peace somehow, somewhere in the center of them or in the corner of them, than the busy activated mind allows us to tune into. So, study these things and get to know them more.

That brings us to the capacity to recognize when we cling, when we resist, and where our attachments are. As the practice deepens, there's a process of letting go, relaxing, or softening our attachments. It goes deeper and deeper, more and more to the core of who we are. We start letting go of small things, which is a training to let go of deeper attachments. We don't want to become attached to letting go. We don't want to be attached to these deeper states of well-being and peace that might be there; that is a recipe for unhealthy agitation again.

Then, we drop down deeper and deeper to some of the deepest places we can let go to. The deepest peace is what's called release. Release is peace. The deepest peace comes from a profound release where we're no longer in the world of polarities between peace and agitation. We are centered in such a way that a peace goes with us—a calm goes with us—even when we're busy, activated, and doing things, it's not far away. The deeper the letting go can be, the more thorough it can be, it creates a space of absence. A space where there's a spaciousness in our minds, our hearts, and our bodies. That spaciousness can feel calm, can feel open. Because it's more like space, things can happen to us and they go right through that space. If we are peaceful, but "peaceful" is kind of like we're holding ourselves peaceful, it's a very palpable state of peace that is a wonderful feeling. But that also is not an empty space of freedom where things can just go through, or where there's space to hold everything. This letting go is what creates this inner space which provides a qualitatively different kind of peace, a different kind of calm, a different kind of well-being, and room for all of ourselves.

To navigate this world of ours with the idea that we want to make room for all of who we are, we do it in this particular way, where there are no attachments and no clinging. On the way there, we have to make room for our attachments and get to know them as well. It's a wonderful journey, finding our way.

I'd like to end this little series on "Finding Our Way" with these different states by saying that one of the lessons I'm trying to get across is: don't have a categorical right and wrong for almost any state that you have, any way that you are. Take time to look at it. There's almost a time for everything, and certainly a time to study it and get to know it. Finding our way, navigating this world of ours when we're a mindfulness practitioner, has a lot to do with bringing mindfulness and space, mindfulness and room, to how we are, so we can learn to find the wisest and freest way to navigate this life of ours.

Thank you for participating in this. For this weekend, it can be a theme for your home practice to study your relationship to agitation and peace, agitation and calm or tranquility, whatever you like. See if there's a pendulum that swings between them. Do you prefer them? Do you hold onto them? What happens if you spend time with each, studying them, getting to know them, becoming more familiar with them? Become the connoisseur of your agitation and of your peace.

Thank you.